{"id":32948,"date":"2024-07-31T13:28:20","date_gmt":"2024-07-31T18:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=32948"},"modified":"2024-07-30T21:33:25","modified_gmt":"2024-07-31T02:33:25","slug":"book-report-scientific-progress-goes-boink-by-bill-watterson-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/31\/book-report-scientific-progress-goes-boink-by-bill-watterson-1991\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Scientific Progress Goes &#8220;Boink&#8221;<\/i> by Bill Watterson (1991)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/scientificprogressgoesboink.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">Like <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/30\/book-report-post-scripts-humor-from-the-saturday-evening-post-1978\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Post Scripts Humor<\/em>, I picked this book up in Clever <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/22\/good-book-hunting-saturday-june-22-2024-the-friends-of-the-christian-county-library-book-sale-clever-branch\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener\">last month<\/a> and used it as a break from reading <em>Walden<\/em> (which itself is a break, a long break, from <em>The Life of Greece<\/em> and <em>The Complete Works of William Shakespeare<\/em>, both of which I will finish this decade, maybe).  I&#8217;ve read fewer Calvin and Hobbes books during the lifetime of this blog (<em>The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes<\/em> in <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/20\/1064\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener\">2004<\/a> and <em>Calvin and Hobbes: The Sunday Pages<\/em> in <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/16\/book-report-calvin-and-hobbes-the-sunday-pages-1985-1995-by-bill-watterson-2001\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener\">2015<\/a>) than Dilbert for some reason, which is odd, as Calvin and Hobbes would be more universal and timeless.  Well, except that sometime in this century, Calvin&#8217;s adventures would have been nothing but staring at an electronic device of some sort.<\/p>\n<p>So this is a contiguous arc of stories dealing with Calvin duplicating himself and Calvin locking the babysitter out as well as shorter, one-offs or couple of days&#8217; worth of Spaceman Spiff and whatnot.  Given that the book itself came out in 1991, presumably these appeared in newspapers while I was in high school.  A couple of years later, they&#8217;re still relatively fresh and amusing.<\/p>\n<p>I mentioned in one of the other book reports (for <em>The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes<\/em>) that you could still find unlicensed decals of Calvin peeing on auto logos and whatnot&#8211;ten years after the strip ended.  Well, I guess it&#8217;s <em>twenty more years later<\/em>, and you don&#8217;t see them around much any more.  So the hold on the public imagination is fading.  The more the pity.  But I have used the word <em>transmogrify<\/em> in conversation recently, and it&#8217;s not because I ran across it in a 17th century tome.  Although with me, I suppose that&#8217;s not out of the question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like Post Scripts Humor, I picked this book up in Clever last month and used it as a break from reading Walden (which itself is a break, a long break, from The Life of Greece and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, both of which I will finish this decade, maybe). I&#8217;ve read fewer Calvin [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32948"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32951,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32948\/revisions\/32951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}